[munro]

It's hard for me to submit to a philosophy for reasons like that it's beautiful, and that you will reach zen. Level 3 enlightenment sounds very cultish to me. :) I've dropped the notion of REST and been very happy with simple RPC, instead of contorting my mental model into resources or to align with the HTTP spec.

I personally have found zen in applying simpler concepts to software development. Such as composition over inheritance to my API design, mixing in certain aspects like content negotiation or caching, when those complexities become necessary. Or separation of concerns, making sure endpoints don't do too much, and the realization of concerns vs technology [1]. Really thinking about the notion of simplicity as describe by Rick Hickley in Simple Made Easy [2]. Or "There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things"--putting off caching until an endpoint becomes a problem--and not worrying if my URL structure is RESTful.

Here's an example of an API that I find beautiful [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy [3] https://mandrillapp.com/api/docs/